An Interview with Dr . Nancy Wexler : Discovering the Huntington Disease Gene
نویسنده
چکیده
Soon after, Leonore was diagnosed with Huntington disease (HD). Nancy Wexler, who was pursuing a PhD in clinical psychology at the time of her mother’s diagnosis, devoted her life to the study of HD. In 1979, Wexler and her colleagues began a research project in Venezuela to search for the HD gene. They surmised that finding the gene was the most direct route to the development of treatments, even cures! They developed a pedigree of over 18,000 individuals and collected more than 4,000 blood samples from the largest extended family with HD ever to have been discovered. Their data led to the identification of the gene responsible for HD.
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